Obviously you don't know squat about my country's economy or the facts which led to this. Argentinian justice department was investigating a massive fraud commited mostly by US based companies sucha as Monsanto and Shell, and several international baks were impled in the maneuver, the HSBC to name one. This fire looks more a way to cover up for that fraud. If you'd like to exercise your memory, I recommend you to take a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_Incorporate]trip down Wikipedia lane[/url]. Iron Mountain has a long history of destroying their own facilites to safeguard their customer's data from Justice investigations.

Obviously you don't know squat about my country's economy or the facts which led to this. Argentinian justice department was investigating a massive fraud commited mostly by US based companies sucha as Monsanto and Shell, and several international baks were impled in the maneuver, the HSBC to name one. This fire looks more a way to cover up for that fraud. If you'd like to exercise your memory, I recommend you to take a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_Incorporate]trip down Wikipedia lane[/url]. Iron Mountain has a long history of destroying their own facilites to safeguard their customer's data from Justice investigations.

Shell is European. Yes they probably committed fraud in one form or another. Unfortunately, it is the fraud of your elected officials that is to blame for your overall problems right now in regards to your economy tanking. In classic political fashion they are blaming some foreign entity for your problems (all countries suffer from this sort of scapegoat shaming, not just Argentina).

Hello Ciber-K, the ones who destroyed the economy are Kirchner and friends (which used to include Clarin & cia, so they are NOT saints).Shell raising the gas prices is obvious taking into account the more than 12% devaluation from the other day, you do remember that Oil is a commodity right? and it's price, and it's extraction costs are all dollar-tied?Why don't you go ask Capitanich (Former province governor, current second in command) why the Gas Stations he created back in his province have the most expensive gasoline in said province?

Have a little respect for the emergency responders that died, just like the people who died back in Rio Tercero when Menem made it blow to cover his arms trading...

Here is a historical breakdown of why Argentina is where it is (summary: it has absolutely nothing to do with Shell):

- Starting with Nestor Kirchner (Christina Kirchner's husband), there were a ton of social programs started that basically bankrupted the already bankrupt country

- In order to keep funding said programs, Argentina decides it doesn't want to pay it's foreign debts anymore, especially to the US. Argentina claimed that they had already paid back well beyond the original loan amounts. Simply put, they didn't like the terms of the loans and decided to threaten defaulting. The IMF threatened to put them on credit blacklist which drove their borrowing interest rates up even higher. In the end they restructured their debt, but like all spending problems, it is never the math that causes massive debt, but behavior.

- Fast forward to about a year or two ago. Christina Kirchner keeps spending on social programs with no way to pay for them and is facing massive devaluation of the Argentine Peso. Investors and individuals start buying up dollars and euros before the peso collapses. Kirchner bans the exchange of foreign currencies in Argentina.

-Fast foward to a couple of weeks ago. Argentine economists fear a massive bubble is building over the artificially propped up peso and convince Kirchner and politicians to open up foreign exchanges before the bubble gets so big that its collapse will crater the country like it did in 2001. You can read more about that incident's culmination here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]

- As a result of foreign exchanges opening up the bubble pops and the peso loses 15% of its value in less than 12 hours.

-Foreign companies that operate in dollars or euros have to raise prices. Commodities tied to dollars or euros are always the first to rise. Oil is probably the most exposed to this as all Oil selling countries have to sell Oil in dollars.

-After a week of rapid inflation, Shell raises it's prices, and...drumroll...SO DO ALL OTHER GAS STATIONS TIED TO IMPORTED OIL.

It bothers me that people are always so quick to crucify companies (in this case oil companies) just because it is the popular thing to do. Those dirtbag Politicians in Argentina are no different than the dirtbag politicians we have here in the US. Their arguments consist of blaming anyone but themselves for domestic policy disasters. Just like Bush blamed Terrorists, Obama blamed Bush, and whoever comes next will blame Obama. Down there, they just say "Those damned European/American money grubbing corporations are doing this to us!" Sadly, like here in the US, the people there buy it hook line and sinker.

Sources - Reading the news, living in Argentina for a few years (2003 - 2005), and having a basic understanding of macro economics and currency valuations.

In the last 120 years, Argentina has singlehandedly destroyed their own economy a total of three separate times. In 1910 Argentina was a 'first world' state, IIRC the fifth largest in the world. Then Peron got elected, and almost his first act was to pull all of the gold out of their national bank and spend it.

He spent the gold reserves nationalizing the railroads and buying votes. Later the lack of those reserves resulted in the Argentine peso having the highest inflation rate in the world. If you were reading the Wikipedia article on Peron, it is apparently written by a die-hard Peronista and doesn't cover the real impact of his policies or the true reasons why he was tossed out - not once but twice. I haven't been able to track down the original citation but from what I've read, literally when he became President his first action was to be shown the gold reserves, where he said, "We will take this and spend it on the people!" - the original wording was better but hey. He did in fact spend nearly all of the reserves, and that was a key factor later in the destruction of the stable peso.

Here's just one analyst's view:

In 1930, Argentina’s gold reserves ranked 6th. After the “experts” took over the central bank, reserves fell to 9th in 1948 (with $700 million), 16th during 1950-54 (with $530 million), and 28th during 1960-1964 (with $290 million).The Argentine central bank, created in 1935, was at first a private corporation. Its president lasted longer (seven years) than the president of the country, and it had strict limits for government debt purchases and even had foreign bankers on its board. It became a government entity in 1946.When Perón assumed power shortly thereafter, he hastily expanded the role of government, relaxed central banking rules and used the bank to facilitate his statist policies. In just 10 years, the peso went from 4.05 per U.S. dollar to 18 in 1955 (and later peaked at 36 that same year). After Perón’s rule, Argentina further devalued its currency to 400 pesos per U.S. dollar by 1970.

(http://www.visionandvalues.org/2013/06/dont-cry-for-me-america-comparing-argentina-and-the-united-states/) - I don't know anything about this site, it was just a convenient Google result. But these facts are well known.

It should be said that Peron was not the first, or only, leader who made a mess of things in Argentina. The Argentine political system was already suffering from various issues including classism, huge gaps between industrialists and workers, etc., and (according to several sources) a political mind set that made and makes it difficult to maintain a working democracy. The so-called 'Infamous Decade' starting in the 1930s destroyed what was left of a traditional political system and made it possible for the fascists to take over. This [pearsonglobalschools.com] is a pretty good description of the situation.

I wonder how effective that would actually be... If a national bank decided to destroy a large amount of debt records and then simply refused to acknowledge foreign debts without extensive documentation?

In the UK if you dispute a debt the onus is on the lender to prove it exists. Quite often with old debts they have lost the paperwork and end up having to drop them.

If a national bank decided to destroy a large amount of debt records and then simply refused to acknowledge foreign debts without extensive documentation?

Your logic is completely ass backwards, since the foreigners will have the original loan records, not the Argentines.

Abolishing foreign debt is one of the 5 ways to eliminate debt and you don't need to destroy records to do it.

Germany was having significant financial problems in the 1930's; which actually allowed Hitler to gain control. Once in power he basically said "fuck you" to all foreign debts - as that was the previous government's doing. That will ruin your country's credit rating, so he just pillaged all of Europe instead.

That happened here in the US for a number of home loans - their loans had been shuffled so many times between institutions that some borrowers successfully argued in foreclosure proceedings that there was no evidence that the foreclosing party actually owned the loan.

And in response most states enacted laws requiring that the mortgage be paid off before it could be challenged in court. Of course once its paid off... who the fuck cares? Result: Literally millions of fraudulent foreclosures. It was so bad that there were legal documents being presented in federal court signed with the name of an employee of the bank that could not be found. The bank had absolutely no record of anybody by that name ever working for the bank. The bank had made up a name and the signing of the documents was fictitious. But because the law required that you pay off, or otherwise post a cash bond for the amount of a loan, before you could challenge it... the fraud was allowed to stand in federal court unquestioned.Source: I was a mortgage broker in California and watched this happen first hand.

Oh, I will add too... that with the law so protective of the lenders... they got bold. I dealt regularly with court documents where the value of the home, interest rate, mortgage value were all different than what was on the original wet ink signature documents (that I kept scanned copies of). I tried several times to submit my scanned copies to the court as the mortgage broker involved (showing that the lender was fraudulently foreclosing...) in the original transaction but was stymied every time. Any evidence submitted by the defense was essentially void until a bond had been posted for the same amount as the outstanding mortgage. The judge would not even listen to any discussion about inconsistencies, possible perjury, fraud or anything until we paid the bond to gain standing in court. We tried that route and the lowest we could find was 90% equity on a bond. Meaning we had to put up 90% of the value of the mortgage just to fight it in court. When you are fighting over a $700,000 mortgage... who has that kind of scratch just sitting around? If you do... $630,000 is most likely pocket change to you.

I will never, ever, ever buy a house in the united states after witnessing that.

Billy The Kid was a hero to many in the west not merely because he "stood up to the man", but because in the middle of a depression, when he robbed the banks, he burned them on the way out, thus destroying the only copies of mortgages and freeing many from impending foreclosure...

I'm masochistically viewing this story in slashdot beta. It's horrible.

A few replies down a tree, and comments are squished into a bar about 1/16 the width of the screen. Half of the left-hand side is taken up with whitespace and vertical rules, the right-hand side is taken up with ads.

The comment threshold system is fundamentally broken.There's a stupid ever-present menubar at the top of the page.The fucking 'dept' joke is *below* the summary, not above it. Why? Who the hell knows.

I'm pissed, because I've been coming to this site since 1998, I like the community, and I fear that a good chunk of the regulars will leave if Beta is really forced on us.

My big issue with it is the crazy amounts of wasted whitespace. This is a trend in site layout that needs to die.

Here Here. Slashdotters like data density. We extract lots of information very quickly. eg. Having a UID next to a user name infers how long they have been in the community.It is like pixel density in monitors which has gone backwards in the last 10 years, and now is only just starting to progress again with 4k displays. I want more data density, less white space.

Quite you. Your new DICE overlords don't believe in UID's having any value, and they don't value data density. They believe in being the next gawker with a horrible UI that will make them trendy and hipsterish.

Readability is less in the new version too. A lot in uselful info of a comment is dimmed. The contrast is diminished all over a post. No clear demarkation between a title, user details and post content.

This is the part that kills me. As far as I can tell, there is no way to expand/view the parents or children of highly-moderated posts without viewing at -1, at which point the highly-moderated posts get lost in the noise. Lots of "Funny" replies where I can't even open the parent post to get the context of the joke.

ROFLTried it myself after all the fuss here and it doesn't resemble what you descibe at all. To make it truely painful try XP and IE 8. The 1st 3 stories (i think) are all kind of on top of one another. There is a little helper box descibing and pointing to menu items I don't actually see. Some more odd menu? entries or buttons. Past the 1st screen it seems to settle down with less than ONE story per screen usually with a HUGE pic with little relevance. Oops, i mean no stories per page, took 2 pages to get something to read. Really? Someone replaced the little icons with a pic taking up 90% of the screen, wtf? BIG green header bar with a little tiny "slashdot, news for nerds" Why the hell does it need a HUGE header, half of which (which should be the whole thing, and certainly has room for the news for nerds tagline) follows me down the screen in case I forgot where I was.

Even if it worked as it appears to be attempting to, I have no desire to read news stories that take longer to scroll to than to read. Since I am not getting a new office computer to read slashdot I would be gone too. Feel free to paste this to feedback, with where I see this headed it isn't worth investing my time.

I am with the one that mentioned data density, everyone seems to be going content-free lately:(

I'm interested in contributing, I've got a couple machines and some bandwidth, but it depends on some other factors. I really enjoy Slashdot, and would love to see this community continue, or if "we" go elsewhere, join that crowd. Maybe we can make a poll or something in what users are interested in feature wise? Slashdot of a certain era for example, or this could be a great time to refactor while keeping a familiar layout and moderation system. What's your skillset?

You are complaining about crappy stories and shitty web design, and then recommending Reddit as an alternative?

The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one.

You're full of it. The reddit's stories are much the same as/. but they have many more of them. In addition reddit's web design is far superior to slashdot beta. Slashdot beta have got so many things wrong with it it's just ridiculous. The so-called "designers" who did it should hang their heads in shame. I put an entry in my hosts file to kill the random redirects to beta. If that dies then slashdot is just another advertising junk site as far as I'm concerned.

I read Reddit and Hackernews for most of my tech news these days but have always fallen back to scanning Slashdot every day for the cream of the crop and to check the comments for interesting dialog because it was a lightweight, scan to get through the content.

I've gotta say, the Beta is pretty bad from a UX perspective and I would say that it is out of line with my perceptions of who a Slashdot user is.

It's like someone just said "this is trendy, make it happen" without any real consideration for the active user base. I can only hope that the feedback from the Beta supports my perception and they reverse on it, but I have to admit to myself that that's highly unlikely and I can say right now that it will very likely effect my visit frequency to the site.

Even the front page is a disaster. Classic Slashdot has a nice list of stories. A list is easy to scan. The new site has some kind of bullshit "showcase" of stories at the top, followed by massive story blocks that make me scroll like I'm looking at a mobile site on my 5" phone screen. Throw in some stock images because... well, who knows, it pads the space I suppose, and maybe some people like stock images of network cables and company logos.

Once you've filled it out, you can't go back, you get redirected to the beta front page. There were several "WTF does that mean???" questions that REQUIRED yes/no answers. Even the QUESTIONS about the beta site suck.

have you left any constructive comments in the Slashdot "blog" threads?

Yes, and they've all been ignored. Just like every "feedback" thread that's ever been run by a corporation. I also filled out the survey. Ignored.

The change will happen. Readingship will nosedive. Someone at Dice will say "See, told you Slashdot was dying, this proves me right". The site will be mothballed, and Dice News (tm) will be opened as a "leader in a newspace with no competition".

This is the first design change that has actually made me consider leaving.

Classic is the only thing keeping me in the comments section.The fact that/devs decided to truncate long urls, even for classic Plain Old Text, should have tipped me off that my kind isn't wanted here anymore.

Whoa, I don't think ever seen that low a UID here before.. or I just never noticed. I thought you had all died out by now.
Why not tie a bunch of balloons to your house and float it on over to Argentina. Their banks are getting a fresh new start, mortgages should be cheap.

An old RPG scenario I played in included some meddlesome wizard who appeared and disappeared repeatedly with what the DM enunciated as *bamf* each time. So your user name fits exceedingly well with what you just did there.

And yes, beta has serious problems. Regressing to having to bang on the "Load More..." button instead of "Load All Comments" while not logged in is one glaring example. The fact that comments don't flow around the end the right side ad bar is another.

This is not Twitter. People write lengthy comments here; please don't piss away space with huge margins and poor layout.

I still read the site every so often, but it's gone from one of my main sites that I read religiously to one that I forget about for a week or two.

The level of the articles don't even warrant skimming the summary in most cases, let alone reading the comments or actually commenting myself. Part of it is that my interests have diverged and part of it is that Slashdot has seriously lost any edge it ever had.

I can see why they feel the need to freshen up the design -- and it's not like it's ever been strong on a design front -- but the beta is atrocious and once I can't avoid it I doubt I'll ever be back. Slashdot may have outlasted Digg but I suspect it will share the same fate.

McDonalds notes that the best people to own franchises are farmers, because they follow instructions to the letter. Since the McDonalds franchise model has been honed to perfection, the farmer-owned franchise is a guaranteed success.

The worst franchise owners are MBAs. They want to make changes, to do things "better", and this never works out in practice. The franchise instructions do things in specific ways for a reason, all the bugs have been worked out, and the franchise model really is the best way.

Slashdot is run by MBAs, they won't listen to us. They know better, because they are, like, business majors... ya know?

The biggest mistake MBAs make is thinking that management/administration is a plug-in skill - you can move to a different business and manage it without knowing the ins and outs of the business.

Any MBA can become a middle manager in, for example, a newspaper without knowing the newspaper business. It's all about managing people, getting projects done on time, and being a buffer between management and workers.

Any MBA can manage Slashdot, you only need to survey the landscape and implement all the features that make other news sites great.

I was going to leave feedback, but their link took me into third party site hell (nice going guys).

The redesign is a bad idea. What makes the classic design work is the same thing that makes Craigslist work - there's a maximum of readable poop per area of screen real estate. We don't need large, flashy fonts, big catchy icons, etc if that means fewer stories or shorter summaries on a page. That's how you get into the "we made the site look so good that everyone left" syndrome.

i've got the feeling the beta slashdot was designed by someone who makes websites for the elderly

Not quite. It was designed by someone who (sadly) knows what they're doing, and more importantly knows what advertisers currently want.

A lot of sites have shifted over to this kind of design, so Slashdot is far from alone. Advertisers like it for various reasons - mostly it comes down to ads being more eye-catching - and of course advertisers control the purse strings. But at the same time the public has also had it ingrained into their heads that such a design is the definition of "modern", and therefore any site not using such a design is by definition not modern, and therefore not worth their time ("the site's owners can't be bothered to keep up with the times?"). Which just leads to a feedback loop of advertisers liking it even more, since they want to advertise on sites that the public perceives as hip/modern so that their products are seen in a similar manner.

But the truly terrifying thing is that the industry isn't done yet. I can show you what the future will look like and it isn't pretty: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5307992/inside-the-mind-of-a-fanboy [theverge.com]. By all accounts the advertisers seem to love it; the text is big and readable (i.e. not threatening), there's animation and lots of flashy effects, etc. It basically reads and behaves like an interactive glossy magazine (People, not Popular Science).

Not that I agree with any of this. Beta needs to be buried 6ft under in a grave lined with lead. But there is a method to their madness; despite what a lot of people here think, Dice hasn't gone off of their rockers. The rest of the world is just slowly moving on from text to images and iconography, as sad as that may be.

change happens, sure, but when change is for the worse should we really embrace it? There is no shortage of news sites on the internet, I think the majority of old users like myself still come here for the comments/discussion, and if a redesign makes the comment section less usable and so causes people to leave, what's left then?

I think the restaurant metaphor is misleading, because it assumes your patrons are entirely interchangeable./. to me is more akin to a club, where you do have the old members with the most knowledge, and the new members joining and learning from the old members and perpetuating the club "culture". If this redesign goes through, a lot of the mentors/old members will leave, and if they go under the critical mass needed to sustain it there is a risk the site itself will become non-viable and just a news aggre

Yea, if any of you haven't been in one of these data centers, the sear improbability of this kind of fire is staggering.

The rooms are usually kept so cold you need a jacket.There are firewalls everywhere (and I mean the physical kind)They have sprinkler systems in the looses sense of the term, They more likely dump CO2 to avoid damaging the equipment.If all else fails the room seal and Halon dumps (or one of its alternatives) making combustion almost completely impossible.

The only way I could see it happening is if things were shut down for a test or something...or some neighboring building that was much larger exploded or something.

And there is you have the culprit. Walls of fire should not be placed anywhere near anything you don't want to burn. "But the Mount of Doom has a lot of fire" you say. Yeah, and it didn't do them any good, now did it? Just use a few more Orc patrols and be done with it. It may seem more expensive, but at least you won't have problems with people accidentally catching on fire and burning everything.

I know it's horrible that some first responders died in this, but I have to ask if anyone's looked to see if there have been any new hand-crafted soap manufacturers and/or liposuction clinic thefts in the area lately...

Day 1: It wouldn't stop, the redirecting. At first I thought it was malware. Had my first drink in a long time.

Day 2: Barely had the strength to carry on as the BETA REDIRECTIONS continue.. trying not to talk to hallucinations at the bar and in the bathroom which laugh at me about these redirections.

Day 3: Discovered the BETA redirections were random, and while at first they looked somewhat usable, when I looked at me and my monitor screen in the mirror, a horrible woman with flesh hanging off of her body l

Allow me to stress the importance of a multi-tiered backup strategy. The loss of any individual tier should not result in the loss of any data...

We're not exactly fanatical about our backups, but we still go for a three tiered strategy for our live systems: on-system (like nightly SQL dumps), off-system (nightly disk images stored in the datacentre), and off-site (nightly incremental rsync-based backups). The failure of any one of those backup tiers wouldn't be an issue...

I don't see why archival storage should be much different. You should have at least two copies of everything in different locations, on-site and off-site. Basically, if you're shoving archival data in a third-party facility like this, you have no backups of your archives...

Very few companies want to keep those archives - the data can only harm them. You store one copy as legally required, and you store it in the best facility to show you made a proper effort, and if something still happens, well, it's not your fault any more.

I'll be very sad if Slashdot gets flushed down the tubes. Like everyone else, I come here for the comments. (Certainly not for the summaries, or timely news.) I can find neat stuff anywhere (reddit!) but nowhere else has anywhere NEAR the level of discussion that you find here. At the other end of the scale, HN and Quora get dominated by a few heavy writers and they're way too serious most of the time. I LOVE Slashdot's patented mix of light, informative, funny stuff.

After 17 years here (HOLY CRAP!), I have no idea what I'll do if (when?) it goes.

Dear DICE: Can you PLEASE not fuck this up and turn it into some shitty Business Insider clone or something? Can you possibly just let a good thing stay as it is?